Last Days (in Taiwan)

First of all, I want everybody to see this incredible advertisement banner I found on the street:





Yes, there are two of him!

Here are some pictures from the trip to Gaoxiong yesterday:
























Today I walked up the little mountain near the apartment. From the apartment window I can see a large part of the lush green mountain, and near the top a red-pillared temple is visible. Climbing up the steep stairs at the base of the trail, I thought I would set the temple as my goal. Probably in part because it's Sunday, there were a lot of other hikers on the trail, including many families. The steep stairs continued up for several minutes, and then the path forked. A sign indicated four possible trails, and I chose the "scenic route".

There were some plastic bathtubs lining the uphill side of the trail, helping to contain the erosion. Not much farther up, I started to hear something that sounded a lot like pop music. I wondered if there was a concert going on until I came to a covered platform where an elderly trio stood in front of an old TV, singing karaoke. Behind the karaoke shelter, on a bigger platform of concrete, there was a pretty large temple. No one was inside the main room, but I could see a few people through a window in the side room, and there was incense burning.

I kept walking, and before long the trail passed a fenced court with two guys playing badminton. We were pretty high above street level at this point, and seeing a badminton court in the middle of what otherwise could be described as a mountain jungle was even stranger than the karaoke and the temple.

After walking a little farther, I started to hear the familiar sound of reverb-y singing. Sure enough, thirty seconds later I came to another temple with some old people clustered around a TV in front. This temple was actually more of a complex of separate shrines than a single temple, and I walked past several of them across a wooden porch and looked over the railing to see how high I had come. Ten feet below me there was another badminton court, with a game in full swing.

I think I passed at least 20 temples and 10 badminton courts on my walk to the top of the mountain. There were very few sections of the trail from which you couldn't see a structure of some kind, whether it was a court, a temple, a fenced garden, a swing set, or a sheltered platform--often with a sink and a card table, and sometimes someone cooking at a stove. About half of them were occupied, but many of the unoccupied ones had the look of ruins. I came to one open area with a concrete table and stools covered with little tiles, but a big section of the table was missing, and tiles were scattered everywhere; a similarly tiled concrete bench sat next to it, but the end of the bench was also broken off. It seemed like the place hadn't seen another person for decades. On the way back down the mountain, I passed through the same area again. This time, there were three old men sitting at the table; another one sat on the bench; a final two were practicing calisthenics in the middle.

In some of these spaces, there didn't seem to be much separation between man-made and natural objects. The path to a garden was covered with a moldering red carpet. Another section of the trail was embedded with Astro Turf. At the first shelter I had come to with karaoke singers, the railing was lined with plastic bottles, each one with a bamboo shoot growing out of it. A statue of Sun Yat-Sen had cracked down the right side and part of the face had fallen off. Sandbags that had been used to support a platform were turning into soil and now ferns were growing out of them. Land was developed, structures were built, and immediately the forest started to reclaim them.


















After walking back down, I met Ivy at the Yong He Dou Jiang place for lunch and to say goodbye. This time she ordered, and we had dam bing, shao bing (eggs in a kind of crispy pancake, as opposed to the dam bing's soft pancake), tofu pudding, parsnip cake, and a bowl of hot soymilk. Drinking spoonfuls of soymilk, I asked Ivy if Taiwanese people had ever thought about adding cereal. I could see from her expression that I had just blasphemed. Before we parted, Ivy also took me to Longshan temple, a huge one in a crowded part of town. The temple was filled with people praying to the many gods who had shrines there. Then, for something completely different (but no less crowded), we went to Ximen, and I got another couple t-shirts. One of them has a picture of a roadrunner (the actual bird, not the Looney Tunes character) and a boom box and says "The Roadrunner With The Thunder Baetbox." The other, which Ivy bought me as a souvenir, has the Chinese characters lang zi ("long ts'h"). I think lang literally means "wave", but Ivy said the phrase also has the meaning of a person who wanders away from home. Edit: I just looked up lang zi, and apparently it means "loafer; wastrel; prodigal son". Great!





Tomorrow my flight leaves around two, and should arrive in Hong Kong around four. Between now and then I'm just trying to straighten up the apartment a little bit. I don't know how long it'll be before I have internet access again, but maybe the guesthouse will have it. If I can find the guesthouse, that is...wish me luck!